Pagan, Peer and Priest in GM Crops Raid!

My good self (left) and Jo Melzack are taken into custody

It is 5:05AM on 26th July 1999, a bright clear morning and at Walnut Tree Farm, Lyng, Norfolk a farmer is about to go to work in a field. An everyday rural scene except that the farmer is Peter Lord Melchett, Fourth Baron Melchett, ex-Labour minister and Executive Director of Greenpeace, and the field is a crop of T25 maize, genetically modified to resist a powerful weed killer.

A carefully planned Greenpeace operation had begun the previous night with five convoys converging on Lyng from around Britain. Shortly after 5AM Iain McSeveny, Greenpeace’s dour Scottish accountant cut the lock to the field and began a chain of events that would eventually see twenty-eight people, including Lord Melchett and myself, on trial in Norwich Crown Court and the whole future of GM foods thrown into doubt.

The Heavy Metal arrives

The crop is head high, six acres of ‘green concrete’, and a toxic desert in which nothing else lives. The tassels on the crop are just beginning to descend prior to pollination, at which point each head of maize will release 25 million grains of GM pollen. Greenpeace intends to stop this happening, and has brought a powerful tractor and mower for the purpose.

Melchett makes the final adjustments and the machine sets off, cutting through the crop at a good pace; the whole operation should be over in less than an hour. Nothing is being left to chance and a lorry is waiting to return the crop to its owner, the German multi-national corporation AgrEvo. There was however one factor that hadn’t been considered – the Brigham brothers, whose family has farmed this land since the 17th century.

First on the scene is a very angry William Brigham. He is treated cordially; after all it is his land even if it’s not his crop. There had been a meeting in the village hall the previous week, Melchett tells him, when over a hundred of the villagers had called for the crop to be destroyed. Mr Brigham had not attended, under the orders of the chemical company he explains. He storms off in a foul mood, his expletives recorded verbatim by John Vidal, a Guardian journalist invited along by Greenpeace to ensure fair play.

“running like Penelope Pitstop”

Next on the scene is younger brother Eddie, a man of few words. He is sitting on top of an industrial loader fitted with a huge bucket. His brother removes the gate from the hinges and Eddie rams the Greenpeace lorry out of the way.

He then drives straight through the field – and the crowd of people on the other side. Adrian O’Neill, a campaigner from Beverley, later described John Vidal and myself as both “running like Penelope Pitstop” to escape. Fortunately no one is hurt and Eddie heads for the mower, bringing the bucket down and stopping it dead. I decide to check that the driver is all right, but as I make my way to the immobilized tractor I suddenly find Eddie heading back towards me, leading to another rapid dash to safety. His mission accomplished, Eddie then leaves the field to cause some more havoc on the road, squashing the Guardian press car on the way.

GM maize; bag it, bin it

Undeterred by this setback, the Greenpeace team stop bagging and begin trampling the crop, whilst strimmers are unloaded and started up. By now the local police are arriving and over the next half-hour they very politely round up the protesters, some of who are now a long way into the maize. There is a feeling of anti-climax as we all stand in a line waiting to have our details taken. Perhaps two thirds of the crop is still standing, ready to pollinate.

We are loaded into various police vehicles and driven away. Arriving in Norwich the station staff are a bit surprised by their new arrivals especially Lord Melchett. “Is that Lord as in House of Lords?” asks the desk Sergeant. I find myself in a cell with Mick Waldrum, a Forester by trade and our tractor driver, who I’ve known since we were both part of the successful campaign to save the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada. Mick had been driving the tractor for most of the previous day to get it to the rendezvous. None of the windows opened and the cab's previous occupant appeared to have been an incontinent dog.

You're under arrest my Lord

The police do their best to make us comfortable, and we are cheered by gifts of food and newspapers from local well wishers. Rather ironically the headline in the local paper is “GM Crop to Stay”. However as time passes it becomes clear that we’re going to be staying too. The unfortunately named Sergeant Frame eventually tells us that we are being refused police bail and will have to spend the night in the cells.

Next day we appeared in Norwich magistrate court charged with the Criminal Damage ‘without lawful excuse’ of the crop, and more bizarrely with theft of it as well! Twenty-seven of us were freed on bail, but orders had come up from London that an example is to be made of Melchett and he is marched off to Norwich jail. Next morning he too is freed, but not before he receives a cake with a file in it, courtesy of the GM-free Iceland supermarket chain.

The Lyng 28 wedding photo

The wheels of justice turn slowly, and our story now moves forward to April of the following year and to the city of Norwich, where the Medieval Anchoress Mother Julian had created a bit of a stir by suggesting God was both male and female. Perhaps the issues today aren’t quite as profound, but the swarm of journalists suggests that the world is certainly taking note of the case.

In the Crown Court the twenty-eight defendants spill out of the dock and into the public gallery. The jovial Judge David Mellor opens the proceedings and the prosecuting barrister, the appropriately named Mr Farmer, tries to make his case.

He claims we are merely publicity seekers who have destroyed a vital scientific experiment, but unfortunately his witnesses keep letting him down. First Judith Jordan, representing AgrEvo (now renamed Aventis) admits that no studies had been done on the escape of GM pollen, then William Brigham admits that his crop was indeed imminently about to pollinate and that the nearest non-GM crop was only 400m away. Finally Sergeant Chipalfield, chief arresting officer, says that we were polite and determined and apparently not after publicity.

Next day Owen Davies Q.C. starts the defence case. “This isn’t a question of who did what but why they did it. AgrEvo has not sought damages; instead these people are on trial as common criminals.” A ‘lawful excuse’ for Criminal Damage is to prevent damage to other property, as in the case of a fireman who breaks down the door of a burning building. In relation to the charge of Theft he asks, “Did they want the crop to put in their sandwiches or freezers?”

First in to bat for Greenpeace is Peter Melchett. He talks about his fears of the escape of GM crops, which the Government’s own research has said, is inevitable. Greenpeace, he says, has no problems with medical use of GM or laboratory experiments. Instead of field trials of herbicide-resistant GM crops, the government should be investing in chemical free Organic agriculture. He is aggressively cross-examined by Mr Farmer, but manages to keep a straight bat.

Rev Carroll

Next it is the Reverend Malcolm Carol’s turn. A Baptist Minister, Malcolm travelled down to Lyng from Yorkshire with myself. Having only been told at the last moment of the plan he had come equipped for anything, and had even brought his flippers with him in case we were going to sea! (Described in court as ‘clothes for when it is wet’). His subsequent campaigning has seen GM crops banned from all Church of England land.

One by one the other defendants gave their evidence. About half work for Greenpeace in some capacity or other, including Paul Belotti, a grandfather and the Caretaker at Canonbury Villas. The rest are volunteers from around the country and include a Beauty Therapist and a volunteer for the Woodcraft Folk. None had ever been accused of dishonesty before, with the exception of local Oxfam campaigner Michael Unwins, shamefully convicted of stealing a cabbage in the early nineteen sixties.

Other witnesses are also called including Dr Mark Avery of the RSPB. Dr Avery sat on the committee set up to oversee the Government’s GM field trials. He tells the court that this committee first met to plan the trials in October 1999 – after the Lyng crop had been planted. This rather undermined the charge of disrupting vital scientific work.

Greenpeace had prepared a dossier of scientific opinion on the dangers of GM technology, later published in a book. In the event this never came before the jury and the job of explaining what our concerns were fell to one of the defendants, Chris Holden, a recent graduate of Cardiff University. Alone of all the people involved with the trial; Chris had actually done some genetic engineering and could explain what it was. The term ‘engineering’ he explained, was misleading. Genetic Modification proceeded by trial and error and the results were always unpredictable.

Eventually it was my turn at the crease. I explained how as part of the Greenpeace local groups network I had led tours round supermarkets pointing out GM products to shoppers. Two days after a tour round my local Marks and Spencers the entire chain had gone GM free! Under cross-examination Mr Farmer tries to bowl me a few googlies, but I manage to fend them off.

From the Greenpeace website

Martin told the jury that "science advances in various ways and that in terms of the methodology of a scientific experiment, you need to know your methodology before you start the experiment - the Committee that was going to decide how they were going to run the field-scale experiments didn't meet until July 1999 and didn't publish their guidelines until late 1999." Martin said of the GM trial at Lyng, which had been planted in spring 1999, "I don't think it had scientific value or monetary value - perhaps it had some political value."
He told the jury that the GM maize at Lyng couldn't be sold, swapped or exchanged for anything else, and was scientifically non-viable, adding, "unless the farmer grows ornamental maize, I can't see what value it had."

Eventually, at the end of two and a half weeks of evidence Judge Mellor sums up, describing the Greenpeace team as having the mindset of “an elite military unit”. The experience had certainly been a testing one for the group. Sitting silently in court whilst the prosecution attacked us one by one was probably more nerve racking than the action itself. Some relief was provided by an evening spent on Peter Melchett’s Organic farm meeting his herd of Red Pole cattle (causing two to give birth), which reminded us that it was the green fields of England that we were fighting for.

Eventually the jury retires and for two anxious days we waited for the verdict, leaving the court only to take lunch under the Green Men of the Norwich Cathedral cloisters. Eventually the jury return, having dismissed the Theft charge but unable to agree about the Criminal Damage. Rather downcast we return to our homes to await the retrial.

Meanwhile, back in the real world there had been significant events. On 12th April, in the middle of our trial, the boss of Aventis had received a letter from rival company Advanta. There was worrying news from Canada. Kept secret until our trial was over the story broke on 17th May, the same day Prince Charles spoke of wanting a more spiritual view of Nature.

A batch of oil seed rape from Canada had been contaminated with GM seed, possibly from a nearby field. The contaminated seed had then been sown across thousands of acres of the British countryside. Initially the government said nothing needed to be done, but when Greenpeace threatened legal action the order went out for the contaminated crops to be destroyed.

Front page of every broadsheet

The central plank of our defence was that if GM crops were grown in the open, the pollen would escape: on the wind, on the backs of bees and deer and on farm machinery. If GM pollen reached a conventional crop that field would become partly GM. If cross-contaminated crops have to be destroyed then they have clearly been damaged. And, as long as the danger is immediate and the means reasonable, causing damage to prevent greater damage counts as ‘lawful excuse’ in law.

So in September we returned to court for the second innings, and ran through all of the evidence again. But this time the jury was unanimous. We were innocent.



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Well, it will soon be ten years since that happened. Bizarrely the BBC is still showing the clip of me being nicked whenever it covers a story on Greenpeace activists getting acquitted. Even my mum is sick of seeing it.


As a campaigner you can choose the battles you fight, but not the ones you win. In the last decade Greenpeace has won other victories, but we've yet to save the Amazon rainforest, switch the country to renewable energy or cap carbon dioxide emission. But we did stop GM crops in this country.

In the last decade GM food has slipped off the radar a bit. The verdict so far appears to be that whilst it may not be as dangerous as was feared, it isn't as useful as was hoped. However I'm still proud of what I did. We certainly didn't win the battle against GM food single handed - that fight was won before Melchett and co even entered that field. However we kicked the GM industry so hard whilst it was down that it still hasn't got up. And whilst GM crops are stalled in the starting blocks organic agriculture has had a decade to prove itself.

Maybe the jury is out on that too, but I know which way want farming to go.

The Real Secret Rulers of the World

(This was written for Pentacle magazine in February 2008. I put it here to show that I did see the credit crunch coming. Sort of.)

It may have been the Sun what won it, but was it Pentacle what postponed it?

Well maybe not, but last Samhain I wrote an article in this very journal laying into the timid and toothless environmental policies of our two main political parties and then, lo and behold, they decide not to hold a general election after all.

The Conservative Party had just published Zac Goldsmith’s eagerly awaited green policy document. It was a libertarian view of a sustainable economy where the government taxes all that’s bad and doesn’t do a lot else. Cynics like me who remember the bad old days of the ‘biggest road building program since the Romans’ and other great Tory policies of the past were left briefly stunned. The Tories going green? Whatever next?

Well, we had news that the US commander in Baghdad had asked for urgent reinforcements of solar panels and wind turbines. It eventually turned out that the US Army was more concerned about the rate that insurgents were blowing up its oil tankers than its carbon footprint, but for a while we were prepared to believe anything.

However as soon as the ink had dried on Zac’s report we had the phoney election and the Tories had to quickly get themselves some real polices. Zac had evidently been hoping some of his green taxes would make it onto the manifesto to balance out the promised cuts in inheritance tax (not something that he’d ever had to worry about himself as his billionaire dad had selflessly spent the last few hours of his life on a plane to Mexico to ensure Zac never had to pay any) Unfortunately for Zac, political reality scuppered that. Asked if he would go for the idea of taxing the parking spaces of out-of-town shopping centres to encourage people back into town centres, Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne replied “Do you think I’m off my rocker?” Perhaps not a question a politician should ask, but it signalled the end for most of Zac’s green taxes.

The government meanwhile weren’t doing much better. Whilst many people distinctly remembered Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, whilst he was with Overseas Development, producing a report supporting Contraction and Convergence (the idea that all nations will gradually reduce their emissions until they all produce the same amount of CO2 per person) but trying to get hold of one has proved to be a bit like trying to lay hands on the Holy Grail. Officially the report doesn’t exist and is just a mass hallucination.

So it was just as well really there wasn’t an election as it would have been a bit tricky trying to work out who to vote for. I’d have either have to have spoilt my paper or voted Liberal Democrat - if there’s a difference. So why are our politicians so useless? The question must be asked, and for my money the answer is it’s a conspiracy.

Now since the internet came along most conspiracies have met their Waterloo. The army of people who shot Kennedy? All named and shamed on the world wide web. The fleet of white Fiat Unos that did for Lady Di? You can get their registration numbers on Wikipedia. The b*stards who seed the clouds so we all get drenched every Beltane? Well, I’m sure well find them soon. Illuminati, Shape Shifting Reptiles, the Gnomes of Zurich; all outed and exposed, which is certain death for a good conspiracy theory.

But here’s one you probably haven’t heard of: the Mont Pelerin Society. Not a great name, I’ll grant you, especially when you discover that Mont Pelerin is a resort in Switzerland. However we can blame the Mont Pelerin’s for the demise of Zac’s green taxes, the government’s woeful failure to regulate climate destroying air travel, the chaos in Iraq and even the fate of the Northern Rock building society.

The Mont Pelerin Society has just celebrated its 61st birthday. Things weren’t exactly great in 1947, even in Switzerland, but with fascism defeated and a huge US aid package getting the war ravaged economies of Europe back on their feet you’d think they’d have reason to be a tad optimistic. However for the Mont Pelerins the world was going to hell in a handcart rapidly.
The Mont Pelerin’s beef was with Keynes, not the concrete cows of Milton, but the theories of the economist John Maynard Keynes. An old fashioned liberal, he believed the free market was a powerful, but dangerous beast, and only by government intervention, strict regulation, high taxes in times of economic boom and lots of government spending when it went bust, could prosperity be maintained. All those taxes also meant plenty of money for schools and hospitals, but that was really just a side-effect to the economics.

Keynesian economics had rescued the world from the Great Depression and provided the industrial muscle to defeat Hitler, and they were about to raise the economies of Germany and Japan from the dead, which isn’t a bad track record really. However all those taxes didn’t go down too well with a certain well heeled faction of society or with those economists who believe that big business knows best.

So the Mont Pelerins set about changing the world. Their mantra was freedom. Specifically they meant the freedom of corporations to do whatever they wanted, but in their campaign to get their message out they used the broadest definition of freedom they could get away with. Their work, which they thought would take a generation, was to subvert the name of freedom to suit their definition.

By any standards they were spectacularly successful. In the sixties freedom meant sex, drugs and public nudity, by the end of the next decade it meant privatisation, tax cuts and unlimited consumption. Keynes was quietly shuffled off to the old economists home. The neoliberals were in charge. The Mont Pelerins hold that all taxes are bad - sorry Zac, that government regulation is worse - RIP Contraction and Convergence and that corporations can do what they want - even if they happen to be a major building society whose reckless investments would threaten the whole UK banking sector.

Now a conspiracy isn’t a real conspiracy unless someone dies horribly, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that neoliberalism leaves more than its fair share of bodies in its wake. The first experiment in running a neoliberal state was in Chile in 1973, when General Pinochet, having overthrown a democratically elected government and then tortured and murdered a few thousand of his fellow citizens, invited in the President of the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman, and his Chicago chums to advise on free-market reforms.

Chile provided the model for a whole series of economic ‘rationalisations’, the most dramatic and purest of which was what happened in Iraq after the US and British occupation. The entire government, army and police force was dismantled overnight and the whole country thrown open to the multinationals. To deal with the subsequent unrest the world’s largest army of mercenaries was then flown in. The results we see on TV today.

The effects of our own dose of neoliberalism is somewhat milder, but never-the-less we can still see its effects. The gap between rich and poor, which was actually falling in the 1970s, has increased exponentially, and whilst neoliberals don’t like governments spending money on things like the environment, they don’t mind your taxes being used to bail out failing building societies like Northern Rock. After all, the alternative would have been for a lot of rich people to loose a lot of money. (Small investors were already largely protected by a government scheme.) Indeed the reluctance to actually nationalise the failed Rock, even after several billion pounds worth of tax payers’ money had been bunged their way, was illuminating. It was as if having paid for the goods the government was reluctant to actually take them out of the shop.

Indeed Northern Rock is illustrative in another way. Its disgraced, but still extremely rich, chairman Matt Ridley had a column in the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s where, in addition to calling for less regulation of the banking sector, he used to be a prominent Climate Change denier. He certainly wasn’t the only one, and environment policy certainly wasn’t the only area where governments preferred the advice of big business to that of their electorate, or even common sense. Across the pond, for example, Bush has consistently refused to reveal the names of the advisors who put together his energy policy, almost certainly because one of the them was the disgraced former head of Enron, whilst over here when Labour wanted to look at how to reform social services they asked Derek Wanless, one of the board of Northern Rock who had failed to foresee its doom.

The problem, of course, is what we do about it. If neoliberalism was just an economic theory the path would be clear. The old joke is that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion, but even the most die hard disciple of Friedman et al would have to admit that the series of economic collapses that have ricocheted around the world over the last quarter of a century indicate that all is not perfect in the world of neoliberalism. However if it really is a conspiracy then something more direct would be needed.

It’s ten years now since the ‘Battle of Seattle’ - the start of global anti-capitalist demonstrations that have continued ever since. Rioting has its limitations as viable strategy for building change though, and as people frequently point out, the anti-capitalists know what they’re against, but seem a bit hazy as to what they’re actually for. A more serious problem though is that so successful has the Mont Pelerin Society’s campaign been to redefine freedom as an absence of government interference that your average Starbucks-smashing masked anti-capitalist is just as likely to hold these views as his braces wearing yuppie nemesis. A more viable solution appears to be needed.

Now asking people to love government isn’t going to go down too well I know, especially amongst such an anarchic lot as pagans, but really there isn’t a lot of choice. But more government doesn’t just have to mean big government. Local democracy is surely the way forward, and also the way to challenge the perverse freedom of the Mont Pelerins. The way this can happen may be about to be shown in London.

Now whether a city of eight million people can ever be called ‘local’ is a moot point, but unlike most of us Londoners are able to directly elect their leader. By the time you read this we should know which Have I Got News For You contestant has managed to become Mayor. For a chap who cycles everywhere Boris Johnson is remarkably unpopular with environmentalists, whilst his opponent, despite trying to cover the city with tower blocks, has made a lot of green friends by introducing the Congestion Charge. This is the sort of government meddling that makes neoliberals see red so it’s not too much of a surprise that it has become a political hot potato.

At first sight this would appear to be a simple matter of letting the voters decide, but one company has other ideas. Sad to say the company is Porsche. In the Fifties that first icon of cool, James Dean, drove one. In the Sixties Steve McQueen raced through the night at Le Mans in one whilst in the Seventies legions of Gaulois smoking French rally drivers slithered over icy mountain passes in theirs. However when neoliberalism arrived in the City in the eighties and the stock brokers swapped their bowler hats for braces, Porsches became a yuppie fashion accessory and it was all downhill for the company. Your average Porsche these days isn’t even a sports car, but a truck sized monstrosity called a Cayenne.

Ken Livingston has pledged to make these gas guzzlers pay £25 every time they visit the City. If the people of London don’t like that they can always vote for Boris, but for Porsche this wasn’t enough and so they’ve launched a legal challenge. Democracy and big business once more seem to be at odds and if the Mont Pelerins had their way the Germans would be the ones who win.
But despite all this I refuse to be the peddler of doom and gloom. If you are concerned about the state of the world but worry that giving up money may not be practical or desirable then Keynesian economics offer a solution. If you worry that the multinational corporations can’t be stopped then worry no more. They fear government regulation because it works.

There are also hopeful signs that the world of economic theory is moving in this direction too. The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development is a forum where global economics are discussed and where those who disagree with the neoliberal consensus can be knocked back into line. In the mid nineties it drew up a plan, known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, to let the multinationals conquer the world. This nefarious scheme which had the fingerprints of the Mont Pelerin Society all over it, but swift action by campaigners exposed the secret plot and in the aftermath of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ European governments bottled out.

Now, a decade later, the OECD appears to have changed its spots. Looking ahead to the state of the world in 2030 it identifies the main threat to the world’s economy not as protectionist governments, and certainly not masked anarchists, but, wait for it, environmental degradation. Perhaps even more surprisingly it, actually believes that governments should do something about the problem before it’s too late. I’ll repeat that again so that the gravity of this statement sinks in: governments should do something about it. The details are a bit vague and this isn’t exactly the same as saying old Keynes should be disinterred, but it is a seismic change.

Finally, in case anyone still thinks that economic theory is not only dull but useless, I’ll end by quoting the man himself: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood……..Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.

For too long those scribblers have belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, but perhaps the madmen will in future hear a different voice.